An MBA grad works free for startup: Carrotmob Part (2)

Are you a top MBA student or alumni looking for a job? Check out our MBA recruitment platform, CareerMee – find your dream job, even when you’re not looking.

__________________________________________________

MBA grad speaks out about the decision to work for free after business school and what compeled her do it.

. . . AND, we’re back with Susanna Schick from Carrotmob, an innovative startup CareerMee profiled last week. Find the story here.

After getting her MBA  from North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler business school, Susanna decided to move out to California and work, free, for a company she really believed in.

What’s more is that this isn’t an isolated incident. A study by by David Montgomery and Catherine Ramus of UC Santa Barbara examines the tradeoffs candidates are willing to make when selecting a potential employer.

It found, to the surprise of all involved, that a reputation for ethical conduct and caring policies towards employees ranked 95 percent as important as the financial package and were willing to give up about $15,000 of their paycheck to get it. Read about it here and check back later this week for a more in-depth review.

And if you think MBAs were just bending the truth a bit on a survey to make themselves look good, we’ve got Susanna, who has given up more than the average $15,000 to work for her ideals. Let hear from her. . .

_______________________________________________________________________

CareerMee: Has having an MBA helped you in your role at Carrotmob? AND: Why did you choose to work for an internet start-up, and why Carrotmob?

Susanna: I chose to work as an unpaid intern at Carrotmob because it totally fits with my values, and my passion for saving the planet through conscious consumerism. I get to use what I’ve learned about entrepreneurship, sustainability, marketing, and also tap my large network from b-school. It’s great being with a small and dynamic company where I can be myself. People, including my school’s career management services office, tell me I’d never fit in at a large company, and I think they’re right. I applied to some Fortune 500’s, and wouldn’t turn down the right offer, (I am just an intern here, after all) but I’d think more seriously about the culture shock.

CareerMee: Have you had to make any sacrifices to work for a start-up after business school instead of an established business?

Susanna: Yes, the biggest one is that I am living with my parents. But I made that choice before the Carrotmob internship came up, because I knew I’d rather live with them and be close to San Francisco, where there are so very many companies dedicated to sustainability, than live in a city I’m not excited about and working for a company I don’t believe in.

CareerMee: Do you know if many MBAs are taking similar routes?

Susanna: Because Kenan Flagler provides such an excellent education in entrepreneurship, many of my classmates have chosen to work for startups or even start their own businesses, some of which are focused on social and/or environmental responsibility. It takes tremendous courage of conviction and a willingness to earn less than one did before b-school. I would much rather do something like this that contributes to the greater good and utilizes what I learned in school, than go back to my old job.

CareerMee: Have you found the things you learned in business school to be useful in a practical sense?

Susanna: Absolutely. The one problem I had was that some of the classes felt like I was being fed information through a firehose, to quote our awesome Managerial Accounting professor, Joey Bylinski. So that made it harder to retain what I’d learned, but that’s why I never throw anything away, and also one reason why I stay close with the friends who excel in the areas where I’m weak.

CARROTMOB IN ACTION

CareerMee: Overall impressions of working for a start-up after business schoool – advantages/disadvantages?

Susanna: The positives: It’s exciting and there’s a tremendous sense of potential. I work in a great office culture and in a fantastic neighborhood (South Park in San Francisco has launched a bazillion startups). I work every day with smart, interesting people and I’m learning a ton about early phase business development.

I’m lucky, because it’s a great startup that’s well known, with a founder (Steve Newcomb) who has a history of successful launches under his belt, so I feel like I’m learning more than I would at any other startup solely because of Steve’s strong management talent and transparency.

The only downside: The pay.

Thanks for talking with CareerMee, Susanna, and sharing your story. MBA grads, if you’re looking for work or maybe even want to change careers, check out our site, CareerMee, to put your profile out in front of our over 125 recruiters. Nonprofit, green energy and socially responsible businesses are recruitinng on CareerMee now.

Photo courtesy of Flikr user emdot.

MBA Humour: video linkdump

As a change of pace this Tuesday, we thought we’d share some of the slightly funny MBA-related videos we’ve come across.

The Effect of an MBA:

Even though MBAs are far from reknowned for their acting ability or sense of humour, YouTube is awash with skits from the ‘Follies’ of several tier 1 schools. Mostly campy and strictly for insiders, here are a couple of the better ones that may elicit an immature chuckle or two:

Fuqua’s 24 Parody

Wharton’s Sixth Sense Trailer Parody

UPDATE: Great article over at the Huffington Post: ironic ads from before the bailout.

Washinton Mutual (biggest bank failure in US history)

Countrywide

“Everyone of them was turned down by three different lenders…I got them all approved” Nice work!

MBA job interview preparation: some puzzles and resources

The interview process for MBA jobs is notorious – 5+ rounds of trying, time-consuming and arduous round tables, Q&A’s and psychological tests. When my cousin interviewed for Merrill Lynch he said that even riding in the elevator was a test – the superior who accompanied him didn’t show the slightest acknowledgment of his presence, forcing my cousin to pull all his social skills together and try to break ice that didn’t want to be broken. He said that a normal interview about work experience was peppered with off-the-cuff brain teasers like “On an analogue clock, how many degrees of separation are there between the hour and minute hands at three-fifteen?”

MBAs should be well-prepared for these interviews, though – you’ve gotten through a similar application process to get into your MBA program, you’ve had primers and mixers with alums who shared advice and your career services are as eager to see you employed as you are.

But still, when the bizarre questions come – how will you react? There was a trend amongst recruiters recently in which they would ask open, no-right-answer questions like “How many cars are there in a supermarket carpark at 10am on a Wednesday?” or “How many golf balls fit in a school bus?”  The idea was to see how the candidate deals with the unexpected, how creative they were, etc. The general consensus is that these types of questions have fallen out of favor with recruiters (because they aren’t really that relevant) but they are still likely to crop up from time to time.

If you are going into a 5+ round interview process, though, it may help to do some logic exercises to flex your critical and lateral thinking muscles (after all those weeks of rote learning for exams 😉 ). Kill time productively with the following puzzles!

Interview brain teasers

First off, the well-known Rope Bridge Problem:

Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time.

Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

Courtesy of techInterview.org

Now, you could just head over to techInterview and read the answer, but if you haven’t come across the problem before, give it a try and put your thoughts in the comments.

Yarr Maties (the Pirates Problem)

Five pirates discover a chest full of 100 gold coins. The pirates are ranked by their years of service, Pirate 5 having five years of service, Pirate 4 four years, and so on down to Pirate 1 with only one year of deck scrubbing under his belt. To divide up the loot, they agree on the following:

The most senior pirate will propose a distribution of the booty. All pirates will then vote, including the most senior pirate, and if at least 50% of the pirates on board accept the proposal, the gold is divided as proposed. If not, the most senior pirate is forced to walk the plank and sink to Davy Jones’ locker. Then the process starts over with the next most senior pirate until a plan is approved.

These pirates are not your ordinary swashbucklers. Besides their democratic leanings, they are also perfectly rational and know exactly how the others will vote in every situation. Emotions play no part in their decisions. Their preference is first to remain alive, and next to get as much gold as possible and finally, if given a choice between otherwise equal outcomes, to have fewer pirates on the boat.

The most senior pirate thinks for a moment and then proposes a plan that maximizes his gold, and which he knows the others will accept. How does he divide up the coins? What plan would the most senior pirate propose on a boat full of 15 pirates?

Courtesy of techInterview.org

Again, don’t cheat and put your thoughts in the comments!

Head over to techInterview.org for lots more problems and solutions. You also might like to check out Ace the Interview, for more technical, mathematical problems.

Finally, seeing as you’re here to kill time, you may have some fun with Dack.com’s web economy bullshit generator. My best so far is “incentivize end-to-end web-readiness”.

-Rui

pics courtesy of flickr users Jacob Bøtter, ahisgett, darkpatator, respectively.

The MBA and the Fisherman

A lot of MBAs come across this little parable in bschool or through chain emails, but I stumbled upon it again in a column in the Business Standard, and for some it may hit a chord in 2009, so I thought I’d share:

A Harvard MBA was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The MBA complimented the  fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied “only a little while”.

The MBA then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish.

The fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s needs.

The MBA then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll  into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my friends – I have a full and busy life.”

The MBA scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you! You should start by fishing longer every
day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would  control the product, processing and  distribution.

“You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and   eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the MBA replied, “15-20 years.”

“But what then?”

The American laughed and said that’s the best part. “When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich – you would make millions.”

“Millions.. Then what?”

The MBA said, “Then you could retire – maybe move to a small coastal village, sleep late, do a little fishing, play with your grandkids, siesta in the afternoon, stroll into the village in the evenings…”

It certainly isn’t a universal feeling, especially as most MBAs graduate with a loan to repay, but for some (like Jessica Ward) it’s a gentle reminder that boundless ambition and perpetually chasing some goals can be folly.

If you still haven’t found a summer internship or grad job, you should make the most of the situation you find yourself in (if you can afford it!). Seth Godin offered some options:

How about a post-graduate year doing some combination of the following (not just one, how about all):

• Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a non-profit.
• Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL. Not a little, but mastery.
• Volunteer to coach or assistant coach a kids sports team.
• Start, run and grow an online community.
• Give a speech a week to local organizations.
• Write a regular newsletter or blog about an industry you care about.
• Learn a foreign language fluently.
• Write three detailed business plans for projects in the industry you care about.
• Self-publish a book.
• Run a marathon.

Fishermen pic courtesy of Flickr user M Eriksson. MBA & Fisherman story adapted from here, here and here.

Are you still looking for an internship or grad job? How are you dealing with the current situation? Any options to add to Seth’s list? Click the post title and let us all know in the comments!

MBA movies: 10 bschool lessons from your couch

Business school is expensive and hard. Watching movies is cheap and fun. Sure, the results aren’t going to be the same, but seeing as you already forked over for the three letters on your business card, it won’t hurt to take this little refresher course.

Lesson 1: Accounting for Managers

Teacher: Jeffrey Skilling, MBA

Course Materials: Enron: the smartest guys in the room.

Course overview: Covers sophisticated and innovative accounting concepts, like ‘hypothetical future value’, that will help you get your company titles like ‘seventh largest American company’, and ‘most innovative American company’, even when you have no assets. Years from now, your lecturer will be remembered (among other things) as the man who made accounting interesting.

Lesson 2: Risk Management

Lecturer: Nick Leeson (Ewan McGregor)

Course Materials: Rogue Trader.

Lecturer Bio: Nick Leeson caused the collapse of Barings Bank, after losing £208 million in rougue trades. He has made a comfortable living off of his notoriety (after a 4 year stint in jail in Singapore) and is now a published author, a regular on the speaker-circuit and the CEO of a football club in Ireland.

Lesson 3: Corporate Finance

Lecturers: Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas)

Course materials: Wall Street

Course Overview: Fast money, share holder value, and maintaining that ‘sleek  1980’s veneer’.

Note: there is an upcoming Advanced Corp. Finance elective which will also be taught by Prof Gekko (course material: Wall Street 2). Oliver Stone has signed on again as course administrator.

Lesson 4: Corporate Strategy

Lecturer: Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando)

Course materials: The Godfather

Course topics: Competitive strategy in post -war America: maintaining market share, oligopoly, corporate rivalry, mergers and acquisitions.

Note: this course is a prerequisite for Advanced Strat. Management, taught by Michael Corleone (Pacino).

Lesson 5: Marketing

Lecturer: Denis Dimbleby Bagley (Richard E. Grant)

Course Materials: How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Course overview: How to sell anything except pimple cream. Introduces the revolutionary, stripped-down marketing concept of the 2P’s (pork pies).

Lesson 6: Human Resources Management

Lecturer: David Brent (Ricky Gervais)

Course Materials: The Office (UK Version, seasons 1 and 2 plus the Christmas special)

Course topics : Recruitment, professionalism, sensitivity, boosting morale, crisis management, downsizing, …

Lesson 7: Quantitative Methods

Lecturer: John Forbes Nash (Russell Crowe)

Course Materials: A Beautiful Mind

Note: The important thing to take away from this course is that getting too much into the nuts and bolts of all these numbers, stats and probability things will drive you insane. Don’t try to understand any of the economic theories: just go along with whatever everyone else’s doing.

Lesson 8: Information Systems Management

Lecturer: Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce)

Course Materials: Brazil

Course overview: An insightful look at a model bureaucracy – “This is your receipt for your husband… and this is my receipt for your receipt”. Leave no form unstamped.

Lesson 9: Entrepreneurship

Lecturer: Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio)

Course Materials: Catch Me if You Can

Course overview: Abagnale, Jr takes you through all the things it takes to be a successful entrepreneur: charm, confidence, a great pitch, perseverance, little attachment to friends/family, a broad vision, thorough knowledge of your market and product, spontonaeity and a gymnast’s flexibility when it comes to the truth.

Lesson 10: Crisis Management

Lecturer: (Peter Sellers)

Course Materials: Dr Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

Course topics: Dealing with rogue employees, negotiation, ‘acceptable losses’, credible threat, the importance of expert counsel…

A new course has recently been added – Lesson 11: Ethics

Lecturer: All of the above

Course Materials: All of the above

Assessment: This course consists of a single test, one question, 100% needed to pass: “Are you supposed to do what they did?” (We’ll probably let you graduate even if you fail this course).

Any other lessons you think should be added to the curriculum? Let everyone know in the comments (click the post title and scroll down)!

A Note: this post was inspired by and shamelessly lifts ideas from Mike‘s great Amazon list “The MBA for Movie Watchers”. All pics courtesy Amazon.com

-Rui